Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (478 page)

CHARLES: Back to the soil, yes! I’ve been trying to turn my back to the soil for ten years!

ANOTHER CHILD: The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

ANOTHER CHILD : I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!

ALL: Life! Psychic Research! Jazz!

MR. ICKY:
(Struggling with himself)
I must be quaint. That’s ail there is. It’s not life that counts, it’s the quaintness you bring to it…

ALL: We’re going to slide down the Riviera. We’ve got tickets for Piccadilly Circus. Life! Jazz!

MR. ICKY: Wait. Let me read to you from the Bible. Let me open it at random. One always finds something that bears on the situation.

(He finds a Bible lying in one of the dods and opening it at random begins to read.)

(“Anab and Istemo and Anim, Goson and Olon and Gilo, eleven cities and their villages. Arab, and Ruma, and Esaan —  — “

CHARLES:
(Cruelly)
Buy ten more rings and try again.

MR. ICKY:
(Trying again)
“How beautiful art thou my love, how beautiful art thou! Thy eyes are dove’s eyes, besides what is hid within. Thy hair is as flocks of goats which come up from Mount Galaad — “ Hm! Rather a coarse passage …

(His children laugh at him rudely, shouting “Jazz!”, and “All life is primarily suggestive!”)

MR. ICKY:
(Despondently)
It won’t work to-day.
(Hopefully
) Maybe it’s damp. (
He feels it)
Yes, it’s damp… There was water in the dod…  It won’t work.

ALL: It’s damp! It won’t work! Jazz!

ONE OF THE CHILDEEN: Come, we must catch the six-thirty.

(Any other cue may be inserted here)

MK. ICKY: Good-by…

(
They all go out.
MR. ICKY
is left alone. He sighs and walking over to the cottage steps, lies down, and closes his eyes.

Twilight has come down and the stage is flooded with such light as never was on land or sea. There is no sound except a sheep-herder’s wife in the distance playing an aria from Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony, on a mouth-organ. The great white and gray moths swoop down and light on the old man until he is completely covered by them. But he does not stir.

The curtain goes up and down several times to denote the lapse of several minutes. A good comedy effect can be obtained by having
MR. ICKY
cling to the curtain and go up and down with it. Fireflies or fairies on wires can also be introduced at this point
.

Then
PETER
appears, a look of almost imbecile sweetness on his face. In his hand he clutches something and from time to time glances at it in a transport of ecstasy. After a struggle with himself he lays it on the old man’s body and then  quietly withdraws.

The moths chatter among themselves and then scurry away in sudden fright. And as night deepens there still sparkles there, small, white and round, breathing a subtle perfume to the West Issacshire breeze,
PETER’S
gift of love — a moth-ball.

(The play can end at this point or can go on indefinitely.)

THE VEGETABLE,

OR

FROM PRESIDENT TO POSTMAN

The Vegetable
the title of a short story that Fitzgerald developed into a play.  The main character Jerry Frost is a low-level clerk, trapped in an unhappy marriage.   The play portrays his endeavours for something more in his life, and yet he consistently falls short. After the publication of
The Beautiful and the Damned
, Fitzgerald hoped this play would secure financial wealth for him and his wife Zelda. Nevertheless, it was a failure, resulting with Fitzgerald becoming depressed and turning to alcohol. 

The first edition

CONTENTS

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act I

This is the “living” room of Jerry Frost’s house. It is evening. The room (and, by implication, the house) is small and stuffy
—
it’s an awful bother to raise these old-fashioned windows; some of them stick, and besides it’s extravagant to let in much cold air, here in the middle of March. I can’t say much for the furniture, either. Some of it’s instalment stuff, imitation leather with the grain painted on as an after-effect, and some of it’s dingily, depressingly old. That bookcase held “Ben Hur” when it was a best-seller, and it’s now trying to digest “A Library of the World’s Best Literature” and the “Wit and Humor of the United States in Six Volumes.” That couch would be dangerous to sit upon without a map showing the location of all craters, hillocks, and thistle-patches. And three dead but shamefully unburied clocks stare eyelessly before them from their perches around the walls.

Those walls
—
God! The history of American photography hangs  upon  them. Photographs  of children  with puffed dresses and depressing leers, taken in the Fauntleroy nineties, of babies with toothless mouths and idiotic eyes, of young men with the hair cuts of
‘85
and
‘90
and
‘02,
and with neckties that loop, twist, snag, or flare in conformity to some esoteric, antiquated standard of middle-class dandyism. And the girls! You’d have to laugh at the girls! Imitation Gibson girls, mostly; you can trace their histories around the room, as each of them withered and staled. Here’s one in the look-at-her-little-toes-aren’t-they-darling period, and here she is later when she was a little bother of ten. Look!  This is the way she was when she was after a husband. She might be worse. There’s a certain young charm or something, but in the next picture you can see what five years of general housework have done to her. You wouldn’t turn your eyes half a degree to watch her in the street. And that was taken six years ago
—
now she’s thirty and already an old woman.

You’ve guessed it. That last one, allowing for the photographer’s kind erasure of a few lines, is Mrs. Jerry Frost. If you listen for a minute, you’ll hear her, too.

But wait. Against my will, I’ll have to tell you a few sordid details about the room. There’s got to be a door in Plain sight that leads directly outdoors, and then there are two other doors, one to the dining-room and one to the second floor
—
you can see the beginning of the stairs. Then there’s a window somewhere that’s used in the last act. I hate to mention these things, but they’re part of the plot.

Now you see when the curtain went up, Jerry Frost had left the little Victrola playing and wandered off to the cellar or somewhere, and Mrs. Jerry (you can call her Charlotte) hears it from where she is up-stairs. Listen!

“Some little bug is going to find you, so-o-ome day!”

That’s her. She hasn’t got much of a voice, has she? And she will sing one key higher than the Victrola. And now the darn Victrola’s running down and giving off a ghastly minor discord like the death agony of a human being.

Charlotte.
[She’s up-stairs, remember.]
Jerry, wind up the graphophone.

There’s no answer.

Jer-ry!

Still no answer.

Jerry, wind up the graphophone. It isn’t good for it.

Yet again no answer.

All
 right —
[smugly]
— if you want to ruin it,
I
don’t care.

The phonograph whines, groans, gags, and dies, and almost simultaneously with its last feeble gesture a man comes into the room, saying: “What?” He receives no answer. It is Jerry Frost, in whose home we are.

Jerry Frost is thirty-five. He is a clerk for the rail-road at
$3,000
a year. He possesses no eyebrows, but nevertheless he constantly tries to knit them. His lips are faintly pursed at all times, as though about to emit an enormous opinion upon some matter of great importance.

On the wall there is a photograph of him at twenty-seven
—
just before he married. Those were the days of his high yellow pompadour. That is gone now, faded like the rest of him into a docile pattern without grace or humor.

After his mysterious and unanswered “What?” Jerry stares at the carpet, surely not in (Esthetic approval, and becomes engrossed in his lack of thoughts. Suddenly he gives a twitch and tries to reach with his hand some delicious sector of his back. He can almost reach it, but not quite
—
poor man!
—
so he goes to the mantelpiece and rubs his back gently, pleasingly, against it, meanwhile keeping his glance focussed darkly upon the carpet.

He is finished. He is at physical ease again. He leans over the table
—
did I say there was a table?
—
and turns the pages of a magazine, yawning meanwhile and tentatively beginning a slow clog step with his feet. Presently this distracts him from the magazine, and he looks apathetically at his feet. Then suddenly he sits in a chair and begins to sing, unmusically, and with faint interest, a piece which is possibly his own composition. The tune varies considerably, but the words have an indisputable consistency, as they are composed wholly of the phrase: “Everybody is there, everybody is there!”

He is a motion-picture of tremendous, unconscious boredom.

Suddenly he gives out a harsh, bark-like sound and raises his hand swiftly, as though he were addressing an audience. This fails to amuse him; the arm falters, strays lower
—  —

Jerry.
Char-lit!
Have you got the Saturday Evening Post?

There is no reply.

Char-lit!

Still no reply.

Char-lit!

Charlotte
[with syrupy recrimination].
You didn’t bother to answer me, so I don’t think I should bother to answer you.

Jerry
[indignant, incredulous].
Answer you what?

Charlotte. You know what I mean.

Jerry. I mos’ certainly do not.

Charlotte. I asked you to wind up the graphophone.

Jerry
[glancing at it indignantly].
The phonograph?

Charlotte. Yes, the graphophone!

Jerry. It’s the first time I knew it.
[He is utterly disgusted. He starts to speak several times, but each time he hesitates. Disgust settles upon his face, in a heavy pall. Then he remembers his original question.]
Have you got the Saturday Evening Post?

Charlotte.
Yes,
I told you!

Jerry. You did not tell me!

Charlotte. I can’t help it if you’re deaf!

Jerry. Deaf? Who’s deaf?
[After a pause.]
No more deaf than you are.
[After another pause.]
Not half as much.

Charlotte. Don’t talk so loud — you’ll wake the people next door.

Jerry
[incredulously].
The people next door!

Charlotte. You heard me!

Jerry is beaten, and taking it very badly. He is beginning to brood when the telephone rings. He answers it.